Episode Details

Justin Baeder, founder of the Principal Center and a former Seattle principal, shows how to turn a long school improvement plan into a focused agenda for the year. In this webinar hosted by Jethro Jones, he covers theories of action, John Hattie's finding that almost everything works, and how to phase in change.

Baeder describes his old district's all-at-once math curriculum adoption, which took millions of dollars and a week of summer training, and argues most schools can handle about one change like that per year. Jones says his team used Everett Rogers's model to phase in 34 initiatives at Kodiak Middle School.

What you'll learn

• Decide what matters most before you plan, because you cannot emphasize every line of a 27-page strategic plan in your newsletter and staff meetings.
• Map each new idea as an if-then chain, and rethink any plan where you reach a step you can't explain.
• Write three theories of action: instructional, improvement and leadership.
• Let innovators try a change first, then pilot it with mainstream teachers before you make it school-wide.
• Hand off work outside your strengths, as Jones gave the sunshine committee to a teacher who then baked thank-you cookies for every department in the district.

Chapters

• 0:00 Webinar welcome and the Transformative Leadership Summit
• 6:37 From a big strategic plan to a focused agenda
• 14:34 The garden: how many initiatives is too many
• 23:31 Why everything works and best practice stacking
• 29:57 Theories of action with PBIS and parent math night
• 40:16 Instructional, improvement and leadership theories of action
• 48:54 Phasing in change with diffusion of innovations
• 58:26 The Instructional Leadership Intensive overview

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Questions this episode answers

How do you turn a strategic plan into a focused plan for the school year?
Baeder treats the strategic plan as a playbook of everything you can do, then builds a game plan for what gets emphasis this year. He says deciding what matters is the first act of leadership, and he maps each choice with theories of action.

If almost everything works in education, why can't we do it all?
Baeder cites John Hattie: about 90 percent of effect sizes in education are positive. Because nearly everything works, schools pile on initiatives. Ten practices with a 0.8 effect size do not add up to 8.0, and too much activity hides what is actually working.

How do you introduce a change without heavy staff resistance?
Baeder uses Everett Rogers's diffusion of innovations. Let innovators experiment, let early adopters spread what works, pilot with mainstream teachers, then decide on a whole-staff change. By then most people are on board and holdouts see colleagues succeed.

About Justin Baeder

Founder of the Principal Center and former principal in Seattle Public Schools.

Links and resources

• Instructional Leadership Intensive with Justin Baeder

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